Monkeysphere How many close friends do you

Monkeysphere

How many close friends do you have? And how many acquaintances? Is it hard for you to get along with new people? How many people do you keep contact with (write or call at least once a year)?

What do you feel when you watch news about catastrophes in other counties?

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic. " -Kevin Federline What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere. "What the Hell is the Monkeysphere? “ -----First, picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We'll call him Slappy. Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you'd be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We'll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and Bananas. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just eats bananas all the time. But they're all your personal monkey friends. -----Now imagine a hundred monkeys. Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn't remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there's a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies. So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built. -----They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed. Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150. -----That brain, of course, was human. Probably from some guy ending up in a morgue trying to count his monkeys. "So that's the big news? That humans are God's bigbudget sequel to the monkey? Who didn't know that? “ It goes much, much deeper than that. Let's try an example.

Famous news talking guy Tim Russert tells a charming story about his father, in his book Big Russ and Me - Russert's dad used to take half an hour to carefully box up any broken glass before taking it to the trash. Why? Because "The trash guy might cut his hands. “ -----That this was such an unusual thing to do illustrates my monkey point. None of us spends much time worrying about the garbage man's welfare even though he performs a crucial role in not forcing us to live in a cave carved from a mountain of our own filth. We don't usually consider his safety or comfort at all and if we do, it's not in the same way we would worry over our best friend or wife or girlfriend or even our dog.

People toss half-full bottles of drain cleaner right into the barrel, without a second thought of what would happen if the trash man got it splattered into his eyes. Why? Because the trash guy exists outside the Monkeysphere. The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150. -----Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away. And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern.

Principles of Dunbar number Russell Bernard and Peter Killworth and associates have done a variety of field studies in the United States that came up with an estimated mean number of ties =290

It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church. Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters. -----Remember the first time, as a kid, you met one of your school teachers outside the classroom? Maybe you saw old Miss Puckerson at Taco Bell talking to her husband, or saw your principal walking out of a coffee shop. Do you remember that surreal feeling you had when you saw these people actually had lives outside the classroom?

I mean, they're not people. They're teachers. "So? What difference does all this make? " Oh, not much. It's just the one single reason society doesn't work. It's like this: which would upset you more, your best friend dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a milk truck? -----Which would hit you harder, your Slappy dying, or seeing on the news that 15, 000 people died in an earthquake in Iran? They're all humans and they are all equally dead. But the closer to our Monkeysphere they are, the more it means to us. "Why should I feel bad for them? I don't even know those people!"

Exactly. This is so ingrained that to even suggest you should feel their deaths as deeply as that of your best friend sounds a little ridiculous. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside our Monkeysphere versus the 99. 999% of the world's population who are on the outside. ----- Think about this the next time you get really pissed off in traffic, when you start throwing finger gestures and wedging your head out of the window to scream, "LEARN TO DRIVE, IDIOT!!" Try to imagine acting like that in a smaller group. Like if you're standing in an elevator with two friends and a coworker, and the friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE ELEVATOR BUTTONS, IDIOT!!"

They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. That's why you get that weird feeling of anonymous invincibility when you're sitting in a large crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face. Sure, you probably don't go out of your way to be mean to strangers. You don't go out of your way to be mean to stray dogs, either. -----The problem is that eventually, the needs of you or those within your Monkeysphere will require insulting someone outside it. This is why most of us wouldn't dream of stealing money from the pocket of the old lady next door, but don't mind stealing cable, or quietly celebrating when they forget to charge us for something at the restaurant.

It's everywhere. Once you grasp the concept, you can see examples all around you. Go flip on the radio. Some Bill Gates is known to tip 50% at restaurants, but flies into a broadcast tirade if even half that dollar amount is deducted from his paycheck by "The Government. " That's despite the fact that the money helps that very same single mom he had no problem tipping in her capacity as a waitress. -----"So I'm supposed to suddenly start worrying about six billion strangers? That's not even possible!" That's right, it isn't possible. That's the point. What is hard to understand is that it's also impossible for them to care about you.

That's why they don't mind stealing your stereo or vandalizing your house or cutting your wages or raising your taxes or bombing your office building or choking your computer with spam advertising diet and drugs they know don't work. You're outside their Monkeysphere. In their mind, you're just a vague shape with a pocket full of money for the taking. -----Listen to any 16 year-old kid with his first job, going on and on about how the boss is screwing him and the government is screwing him even more. Then watch that same kid at work, as he drops a hamburger patty on the floor, picks it up, and slaps in on a bun and serves it to a customer.

In that one dropped burger he has everything he needs to understand those black-hearted politicians and corporate bosses. They see him in the exact same way he sees the customers lined up at the burger counter. Which is, just barely. -----The kid will protest that he shouldn't have to care for the customers for minimum wage, but the truth is if a man doesn't feel sympathy for his fellow man at $6. 00 an hour, he won't feel anything more at $600, 000 a year. ----- Or, to look at it the other way, if we're allowed to be indifferent and even resentful to the masses for $6. 00 an hour, just think of how angry the some Pakistani man is allowed to be when he's making the equivalent of six dollars a week.

A representative democracy allows a small group of people to make all of the decisions, while letting us common people feel like we're doing something by going to a polling place every couple of years and pulling a lever that, in reality, has about the same effect as the darkness knob on your toaster. -----Any kind of government takes groups larger than 150 people to maintain effectively. Thus, we routinely find ourselves functioning in bunches larger than our primate brains are able to cope with. We can simultaneously feel like we're in charge while being contained enough that we can't cause any real monkey mayhem once we fly into one of our screeching, arm-flapping monkey frenzies.

Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency. -----So reject binary thinking of "good vs. bad" or "us vs. them. " Know problems cannot be solved with clever slogans and over-simplified step-by-step programs.

There are no Supermonkeys. Just monkeys. Those guys on TV you see, giving the inspirational seminars, teaching you how to reach your potential and become rich and successful like them? You know how they made their money? By giving seminars. For the most part, the only thing they do well is convince others they do everything well. -----Don't pretend politicians are somehow supposed to be immune to all the crap we all do in our daily lives and don't laugh and point when the preacher gets caught drunk on video. A good exercise is to picture your personal hero --whoever it is-- passed out drunk on his lawn. There is a good chance he did that many times.